Project Hail Mary

I was looking forward to this book after have just finished the Martian.What a waste of time.At some point I started skipping chapters hoping it would get better, nope.

In the Martian his "high school science lecture" content was acceptable because of the suspense.Here, which as far as I can tell is an attempt to re-create that, it totally fails.After several hours of boring basic science and NOTHING at all happening, I had enough. It's just dull, the attempt at suspense seems manufactured and there's no action.I really liked Artemis, and wish he's written a sequel to that.I am returning this one disappointed.

This has to be one of my all-time most favorite science-fiction adventures. I was absolutely blown away by this audiobook. It’s so well written and has every element of a great story. You’ll find yourself laughing one minute and getting tearful the next. What a great thriller with some of the most intelligent writing I’ve ever had the privilege of experiencing. This is ins’t Star Wars but fits in the same category as interstellar, the Martian, 2001 space Odyssey etc. do yourself a favor and give it a go you’ll be happyyou did.

Andy Weir's previous books have made him one of my top authors.He is scientifically literate and able to come up with optimal solutions to problems in his books.With this book though, I was screaming, "just use a scoop" the entire book.Humanity was given nearly unlimited energy and somehow that is a problem to solve.It's well written, but the core of the book is just shallow and I had to suspend my belief too much during the events of the book.It was scientifically sound, the decisions were just bad.The book was predictable and frustrating and many decisions took away from your imagination.Comparing it to other modern Sci Fi books, it's a middle of the pack book, but it's by far Andy's weakest book.It's sad, if this was any other author, I would have shrugged this off, but it's very clear that Andy tried to cover too much content with this idea.He should shrink his scope with the next book.He works best when he can hyperfocus on specific problems and ideas over on entire book.

If you have listened to any of the Bobiverse novels...this is like an extension of that series. Wier is a clever writer who caters to the nerds. He embeds many nods and references that are familiar to nerd culture which makes the listener/reader feel involved in the book...but this story, beyond its completely implausible premise, just didn't quite do it for me. I can buy small molecules traveling on asteroids, and the like, but space algae? Space algae that does nearly direct light energy to mass conversion and stores that mass/energy in the form of neutrinos and can travel nearly at the speed of light...Please...and let's face it Grace is just not very likeable even if he was Shanghai'd

Great performance and audio production. Started out a little slow with what seemed like perhaps an excess of science related descriptions, but that faded as the story developed. The story flips back and forth between present and past to build the narrative. There's lots of interesting things and hurdles to over come. The characters in the story are nicely represented through tone and accent in this production which fills them out without an excess of stereotyping in doing so.Most of the chapters break at suitable points in the story to come back to or run several at a time. I listened to this 15 hour production at 1.3X speed like I do most non musical audio and broke it up into both short and long listens.I'd be surprised if this isn't made into a movie within the next couple of years. The story is easily that good. Hopefully it'll be mostly true to the book.